Film
Adam Sweeting
The Sutton Hoo burial site in Suffolk has proved to be one of the most valuable archaeological finds ever made in Britain, shedding priceless light on the Anglo-Saxon period of the 6th and 7th Centuries. Simon Stone’s drama (adapted from John Preston’s novel, with a screenplay by Moira Buffini) artfully uses the story of its excavation as a rumination on time and timelessness, a sort of cosmic clock against which to contrast the brief candle of a human life.The Dig works because it knows exactly where it wants to go and how to get there. It gets a huge leg up from Mike Eley’s Read more ...
graham.rickson
Relic's deliberate drabness hits home first; set in Victoria, Natalie Erika James’s modern horror shows us a grey contemporary Australia, a place bleached of all colour. We first see Kay and her daughter Sam (Emily Mortimer and Bella Heathcote, pictured below) driving through a wooded landscape in search of Kay’s octogenarian mother Edna (Robyn Nevin), reported as missing from the family home. James's debut highlights how fraught intergenerational relationships can be, and Kay’s indifference to Edna is made clear when she’s quizzed by the local police about when she last checked in with her Read more ...
Saskia Baron
This is an odd film, made even odder by a caption near the beginning, which claims it is "inspired by true events" but doesn’t elaborate. Produced in Belarus, it’s a Holocaust drama based on a novella by the veteran East German screenwriter/director Wolfgang Kohlhaase but made by the Ukrainian director Vadim Perelman. Perelman had quite a success in 2003 with House of Sand and Fog, but since then seems to have mainly worked in television.Persian Lessons tells the far-fetched story of a young Jewish man from Belgium, who when captured in France in 1942, manages to survive by Read more ...
mark.kidel
Jasmila Žbanić’s latest film, once again about the people of her native Bosnia and Herzegovina, is hardly an easy watch. Focusing on Aida, a passionate and highly capable interpreter for the UN forces in former Yugoslavia, she unflinchingly tells the story of the 1995 massacre of well over 6000 Muslim Bosnian men and boys in the town of Srebrenica. In what was supposedly a safe area under UN guarantee. The town tragically succombed to a genocide for which Radovan Karadžić the prime minister of the Serbian Republic and General Ratko Mladić were directly responsible and later condemned. Read more ...
Owen Richards
Romcoms. We all know the tried and tested formula: immature guy, uptight girl, they meet, they like each other, hate each other, and end up in love. It’s as reliable as it is unrealistic, and sometimes it takes a film like Baby Done to remind you there is a better way. One that is funnier, more believable, and yes, even more romantic.Stand-up comic Rose Matafeo and Harry Potter alum Matthew Lewis star as Zoe and Tim, the last couple standing in the marriage and baby stakes. Everyone else is boring and settling down, but these two (and Zoe’s new-age friend Molly) are quite happy as things are Read more ...
Tom Baily
It is probable that no other document gets closer to the direct experience of frontline workers and victims of Covid-19 than the documentary 76 Days. It is also true that the film is not very enjoyable. Nor, sadly, does it feel especially unique. Worn by news fatigue, most viewers might feel that they are watching an extended news feature, rather than a feature film. Yet it does contain a strange power that is hard to pin down.That 76 Days was made in the first place is something of an achievement. New York-based director Hao Wu had planned to film in Wuhan at the start of the pandemic but Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Catalan director Albert Serra’s interest in late 18th century France is well established – his previous film was The Death of Louis XIV – but the title of his new one has precious little to do with the triadic revolutionary slogan that swept away the French monarchy at the end of it. If Liberté celebrates freedom in any sense, it’s that of libertinage, libertinism, the rejection of moral and especially sexual restraints that was being celebrated at the time by the Marquis de Sade, whose philosophical presence is a commanding one here (alongside, cinematically, Pier Paolo Pasolini, whose final Read more ...
mark.kidel
Volker Schlöndorff’s brilliant adaptation of Günter Grass’s 1959 novel The Tin Drum hasn’t aged one bit: just as the book and film’s main character Oskar Matzerath decides that it’s better not to grow old, the film’s phenomenal zest feels as fresh today as when it was won the Palme d’Or in Cannes and Best Foreign Film Oscar in 1979.Set in Danzig (now Gdansk), Günter Grass’s home town, a crossroads between East and West, both German and Polish, the story takes place in the years leading up to the city’s take-over by the Nazis in 1933, World War 2 and its immediate aftermath. Oskar is a Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Noel Coward's 1941 comedy was one of the theatrical casualties of the first lockdown last March in a Richard Eyre-directed West End revival that aimed to mine the pain beneath this play's abundance of bons mots. And now as if to pick up the baton, along comes a film remake of the same source from the director, Edward Hall, whose father, Sir Peter Hall, was Eyre's predecessor running the National Theatre. Hall senior once directed a fizzing West End revival of Coward's Hay Fever starring Judi Dench, but lightning hasn't struck twice, at least in the transfer from stage to screen Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Veteran Russian director Andrei Konchalovsky has gone back to his beginnings for his latest film. The real-life events on which Dear Comrades! is based took place in June 1962, when social unrest over rising prices saw strikes break out in Novocherkassk, an industrial town in Russia’s south, culminating in street protest against the Soviet regime. The very idea of such an uprising was, of course, anathema in the “workers’ paradise” that was the communist system, and it was brutally suppressed by the Kremlin. The extent of the casualties was concealed, the dead secretly buried, and the events Read more ...
Graham Fuller
The Night Porter depicts the consuming sadomasochistic love affair of an SS officer, Max (Dirk Bogarde), and the Catholic woman, Lucia (Charlotte Rampling), whom he both tortures and protects when she is a teenage concentration camp inmate, and who becomes his partner in a protracted liebestod when they meet by chance in Vienna 12 years after the war’s end. Think of it as the anti-Casablanca.in 1957, Max is the eponymous hotel employee, ashamed of appearing in daylight, and Lucia is the decorous wife of a famous American conductor. They are drawn together again by mutual desire and guilt Read more ...
Joseph Walsh
In 1964, Cassius Clay, NFL superstar Jim Nathaniel Brown, soul legend Sam Cooke and political firebrand Malcolm X gathered for one night in a dingy room at the Hampton Motel. It was a meeting that became a symbol of hope for black Americans. A photo, taken by Malcolm X would make the moment iconic, marking a shift away from the horrors of Jim Crow America to the passing of the Civil Rights Act. The events of that evening became the basis of Kemp Powers' 2013 play, and now form the directorial debut for Oscar-winning actress Regina King, who most recently played Sister Night in HBO’s Read more ...